Christoffel Jegher - Baby Jesus

The subject of this engraving is taken from a work by Peter Paul Rubens, offering a mirror image. The woodcut depicts the Baby Jesus, on the left, caressing a lamb presented to him by the young Saint John, recognizable by the animal skin that characterizes the traditional iconography of the Baptist. The scene, set in a lush, classically styled natural setting, represents the Baptist's premonition of Christ's future sacrifice, symbolized precisely by the figure of the lamb.

The work is a perfect example of engraving art between the 16th and 17th centuries, which signifies an exaltation of the values ​​of design and form over the original pictorial model. Indeed, compared to Rubens's work, whose baroque fervour exudes a pervasive atmosphericism that almost corrodes the forms, Jegher's woodcut exalts plasticity. Indeed, we find an almost multiplication of forms and objects, both anatomical and naturalistic. This is the very essence of engraving art: maximizing the potential of drawing. For this reason, the scene is depicted in every minute detail with a decidedly classical spirit due to the monumentality of the forms. The overabundance of elements in the composition, however, is attributable to a substantially baroque spirit, akin to Rubens's original and the cultural environment in which Jegher's engraving work developed. From a formal point of view, we can admire the excellent technique that characterizes this artist and which made him famous in his time, made up of an extremely fine hatching that outlines each subject with extreme precision.

Christoffel Jegher was a famous engraver who lived in Antwerp between 1596 and 1652. He was one of the masters of the Plantinian Workshop. Among his engravings, we particularly remember his collaboration with the painter Peter Paul Rubens, whose works he reproduced.

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